That isn’t to say that sales-y promotions couldn’t ever create results—as marketing “gurus” have proved. The results just aren’t as good as they could be. Take the biggest gurus’ results—the ones they boast about—and calculate their conversion rates. Often their marketing is comparatively ineffective. They just have massive volume, so the sales numbers are impressive.
CakeMail is an email marketing tool intended for small businesses that makes sending out emails very easy. All users to have to do is title their new campaign, set up list of recipients, give their email a design and select a time to send it out. There is also an advanced editing section which is great for users who are more experienced with HTML. CakeMail can be integrated with Google Analytics so users have access to detailed reports on insights such as open rates, unsubscribe rates, click and bounce.
Set your target audience. Audiences can be split up in a variety of ways including gender, age, geographic location, or buying habits. Before you send your blast, you want to make sure that you can segment people into different lists so you can target your blasts to the right people. Consider what demographic you want to target, and what they will need to fulfill your call-to-action.
Don’t talk down to people. I think this should be obvious. But looking at the email offers I get, clearly it isn’t. Don’t tell people, “Not buying this product would be idiotic!” or “Only a fool doesn’t understand the value in this service.” This whole email marketing strategy relies on you making people understand the value they can get from you. And sometimes that means making people see the downsides of not buying. But you can do that in a friendly, respectful way.
Take advantage of the email template designer or upload your own. There are also tools to segments lists and personalize emails with all your contact data. The A/X testing feature allows you to test up to ten different versions of your email before you decide which one stands out as the best. A campaign comparison tool pits your previous campaigns against the current one to give a complete picture.
He is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

If none of the templates quite match what you are looking for, then you can create your own. We offer a ?Friendly Editor? option, where you can design an email from scratch.There are additional customization options under the ?Custom? tab in the template section of the site. You can import external templates and send through DirectIQ’s secure system.

Please forgive me if I missed this in some of the comments and replies, but I saw nothing on Infusionsoft or Marketo. I was expecting to see both in your analysis, but nothing was mentioned, save for the remark early on that Active Campaign has rocketed past Infusionsoft in the marketplace. Is it because you consider them outside the “Email Marketing” space which was the subject of your analysis?
What I most like about Rejoiner is the shared accountability over results. Many brands spend large sums of money on email marketing software, only for the accountability of results to be on their internal team. With Rejoiner, this is flipped on its head, where the company providing the software shares the responsibility for driving incremental revenue.
AWeber is another popular email marketing tool with a number of great features. Using a drag and drop editor, users can easily create automated emails and make use of their high-quality autoresponder capabilities. Users can also create subscription forms and place them on the website, blog or Facebook page. Within this tool, you can pull up charts showing how many contacts opened emails or clicked on links within your message.
Email Octopus’ free plan (‘Shrimp’) allows users to send unlimited emails to up to 2500 subscribers. Users can send emails from multiple email addresses and there are still plenty of templates to experiment with, although it does not include any automation functionality (which is reserved for paying subscribers). If you don’t fancy signing up for an account just yet, 11 completely free templates are available to download directly from their website.
Fantastic article, thank you! I was wondering if I could ask some advice — we are only a small company that doesn’t need automation or a CRM, we just want to be able to send out monthly emails to 6000+ subscribers that can be categorised into industries or groups. We don’t need bells & whistles. Due to our industry, the chunky CRM doesn’t integrate into a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. so it’s all very labour intensive but lucky for them I do love a spreadsheet. Thanks in advance for the advice.
Make the first three sentences of your blast catchy. The first couple of sentences within your email blast will determine whether the recipient decides to read the rest of it. The intro should draw people in with a sense of urgency or excitement. You can elaborate more on the subject line within your first sentence to give additional clarity to what the email is about, or you can create a sense of urgency and intrigue that compels them to open the email to learn more about the issue.[4]
Creating a plan for your email marketing strategy may seem challenging at first, but by following the steps above you’ll have an effective and easy-to-follow email campaign plan in no time. This means you will be a lot closer to hitting your goals of increasing revenue, attracting new customers, and strengthening relationships with your existing audiences!

Set your target audience. Audiences can be split up in a variety of ways including gender, age, geographic location, or buying habits. Before you send your blast, you want to make sure that you can segment people into different lists so you can target your blasts to the right people. Consider what demographic you want to target, and what they will need to fulfill your call-to-action.

Low barrier of entry: Email marketing is comparatively cheap. But the learning curve also isn’t nearly as steep as with many other tactics. Even if you’re not an expert, you can see great results. Just use the three email marketing strategies. Great execution of the strategies improves your results a lot. But even if you make mistakes, you aren’t wasting your time.

Marketing automation makes it easy for you to follow up with customers and send the right email at the right time to subscribers based on how they are interacting with your website. Some email marketing platforms have basic marketing automation features built-in like the option to send birthday email messages automatically, etc. It’s worth taking some time to figure out the depths of marketing automation you need and your bandwidth for maintaining automation initiatives. These activities can take a big chunk of time to manage.
Well, charity: water took an alternate route. Once someone donates to a charity: water project, her money takes a long journey. Most charities don't tell you about that journey at all -- charity: water uses automated emails to show donors how their money is making an impact over time. With the project timeline and accompanying table, you don't even really need to read the email -- you know immediately where you are in the whole process so you can move onto other things in your inbox.

I appreciate you sharing this great article! If you’re still sending mass emails without updating your email marketing strategies, you'd noticed that results are disappointing, despite your efforts in updating your mailing lists and creating emails. If you aren’t getting clicks, most likely you’ve been wasting your time. However, these tips are game changers, I bet these would help a lot. A must read!

Emma has tons of email templates to choose from, as well as drag-and-drop editor for custom designs. This is their main value proposition (superior design qualities). You can integrate this software with lots of other programs such as Google Analytics, Aviary and several social media sites. Reporting features are very easy to use and give a good overview of results.

If you are a small business, email marketing templates can be extremely handy. They are designed to be easy-to-use, adaptable, and fit in with any campaign.There are hundreds of thousands of templates out there, many of them free. At DirectIQ, we provide email templates as a part of our services, both for free and paid users.A good template must have the following features:

Mailjet is an all-in-one email marketing solution used for sending, tracking and delivering marketing and transactional emails. Some highlight features include its intuitive email editor (e.g. drag-and-drop and ready-to-use newsletter templates), personalisation, smart market segmentation, contact management, as well as a free plug-and-play email API.
Another tool built by AppSumo, List Builder is an email marketing tool that helps you build up your mailing lists. It captures (engaged) visitors right before they are about to leave with pops that are triggered by clicks and timers. It is a very easy tool to use as it has a drag-and-drop functionality and features that can be customised to your brand.
I’ve always been a mailchimp user myself, and I have to say I really like their UI but I’m always open to new options. I’ve dabbled in a couple of the other email marketing providers like Pure360 – but find them so clunky and annoying to use (despite them looking really pretty and having great templates) that I always end up going back to good old mailchimp. I haven’t used GetResponse yet, I’ll give their free trial a shot :)

A very popular email marketing solution, Campaign Monitor provide its users with an easy-to-use drag and drop email builder as well as a drag-and-drop segmenting tool (to create different campaigns with different contacts). Using their email template, users can customise emails to fit their brand. This email marketing tool also offers A/B testing to optimise test subject lines, sender details and email designs.

Thanks Kelly, Mailchimp have definitely come a long way with their UI over the years, it’s just their service that hasn’t caught up ;) I haven’t had the chance to play around with Pure360 as much as I’d like, but I’ve heard the same things echoed by several friends who use their service. Looking at their client list, I think they’re more aimed at large companies though.
Though designed with the travel industry in mind, this template could be applied across a variety of niches. A simpler format than the ?Hero? theme, this suits those who would rather take a more formal approach. The straightforward two-color theme leads to a focus on the content.The header and footer are separated from the main body of the email by clever image placement. The two- color theme makes the CTAs stand out against the white background.Good for:
In addition to A/B testing, many email marketing packages now offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of a campaign to test which one performed best. Services that offer this feature include Campaigner and Mailchimp. Another thing to consider when looking for an email marketing platform is how the email campaigns can boost search engine optimization (SEO) for your organization. The right keywords can lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website. Whether you're looking or a simple email marketing solution or one with full automation, there are several on the market to meet your needs.